CDN for live radio and TV broadcasts

For media companies and other organisations who are planning on live streaming their content, it is important to choose a content delivery network (CDN) that is up to the task. Here are some key considerations...

Your revenue

Let’s start at what is often the most important aspect: that you’re able to monetise your valuable content. We provide an ad replacement service, so you can insert adverts into live content. You can change the version of the advert or even play a different advert for listeners in different countries, which allows you to maximise revenue opportunities. We already provide this service for clients such as talkSPORT.

If the advertising route isn’t right for your content, perhaps you would prefer to create a payment gateway to ensure that only paying users can access your content. Again, that's something we can offer with a Tibus CDN.

Geographic territories

The last thing you want is a legal battle on your hands for breaching a licence or contract in relation to the territories in which you are allowed to broadcast. Equally, perhaps you want to restrict broadcasts to only be available to audiences in markets that you are able to monetise.

In either case, you need to choose a CDN that allows you to easily limit a broadcast to particular countries. We work with UTV to ensure their content is only available to viewers in appropriate territories

Broadcast times

Perhaps your licence restricts broadcasts to particular times, or maybe your stream is constantly recording, but you only want members of the public to be able to view it during set hours. This can be controlled and limited using our CDN.

Ingesting, uploading and encoding

Remember, a CDN is only the final piece of the puzzle, when your content is ‘pushed’ to the audience. Make sure you choose a CDN provider that will meet your requirements in terms of collecting your audio and/or video stream, uploading to the internet and encoding the stream into a format that is suitable for broadcast on the internet.

Flexibility

Many CDNs will accept ingest feeds in only certain formats and all CDNs place limitations on the format of the streams that they can service. Tibus’ CDN offers full flexibility because we allow any format and will stream to any device.

Control and oversight

The flexibility mentioned above comes because we operate our own CDN across the UK and Ireland. We offer an end-to-end service, from the location at which your broadcast is being recorded to that broadcast’s arrival on any device. As such, we - and therefore you - have full control over the streaming process.

Managed service

If you need your broadcast to go out live without a hitch, it is worth considering a managed CDN service so that you have engineers available to make sure everything goes smoothly. For instance, the Northern Ireland Assembly uses a Tibus managed service to ensure the live streaming of Assembly hearings runs smoothly and is ready to cope with spikes in demand.